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zaterdag 7 juli 2012

Geordie Shore's Gaz Beadle has apologised for encouraging male Twitter followers to post photos of women asleep in bed with them following one-night stands.

Beadle initially tweeted on Sunday, July 1: "How many people r doing the walk of shame hahahaha #wakeupwitharandom #awkwardtaxihome."

This resulted in dozens of men posting photos of themselves next to half-naked, sleeping women.

With the hashtag #bedofshame trending, Beadle then wrote: "Loved #BedOfShame #awkwardsundays. Defo doing it again next week yer?"

He subsequently faced criticism, with one Twitter user writing: "Everyone on Geordie Shore is vile, but that Gaz is by far the worst. Bed of shame? What a disgusting pig", and Reveal magazine naming and shaming participants.

However, others did not condemn Beadle's behaviour, with one user writing: "In fits about #bedofshame. Cracking bit of banter."

The reality TV personality has now removed the relevant tweets and photos from his account, and today (Friday, July 6) apologised, writing: "I'm truly sorry for my behaviour on Twitter. I know I've let you down.

"I've deleted the photos and comments and please will you do the same."

A 'singing Billy Elliot' and a rock star reject are among the acts who stun the judges during the first episode of Andrew Lloyd Webber's new talent show Superstar.

Lloyd Webber and his judging team - Mel C, Jason Donovan and Dawn French - are looking for a rock opera sensation to star in the first UK arena tour of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.

The judges are left speechless by an audition from former Reemer singer David Hunter. The 24-year-old, who has supported McFly and Scouting for Girls on tour, leaves Mel C and Donovan in awe at his rendition of 'Awaiting You'.

Lord of the Rings star Sean Astin will play Roland, an Alpha with the ability to absorb memories, TVLine reports.

NCIS actress Lauren Holly will also appear on the Syfy drama as a senator with a hidden agenda.

Summer Glau - who appeared in the show's first season as Skylar Adams - will additionally reprise her role for three season two episodes.

Southland's C Thomas Howell has also been lined up for a guest role, playing a man with super speed. Meanwhile, Caprica's John Pyper-Ferguson will reprise his role as Stanton Parrish, and CSI: NY's Kathleen Munroe will reappear as Dr Rosen's (David Strathairn) daughter Dani.

Former Eureka co-executive producer Matt Hastings has joined Alphas for the new season.

The series returns to Syfy on Monday, July 23 at 10/9c. In the UK, the series airs on 5*.

In his interview with Dowling afterwards, Arron said he was "not really that bothered" by the boos that had greeted him, explaining: "I'm that kind of character."

He went on to predict that, when he watches his time on the programme, he will "probably be booing [himself]".

However, when Dowling asked if Arron was surprised to have been evicted, he said "Yeah!" and described Deana as "a lovely girl but... boring", joking that he refused to believe that she received the most votes to save.

On seeing who nominated him, Arron described them as "backstabbers" but said he was "not even bothered".

Asked if he was a backstabber himself, he replied: "We're all backstabbers. Welcome to Big Brother. Welcome to the jungle."

He was then shown footage of his pranks in the house, and said: "I really didn't realise that I was that bad. Looking at that... I'm 23 years of age... I was acting like a 10-year-old."

When confronted with a montage of his Conor 'bromance', he explained: "It was honest... I trusted him. He was a cool kid."

He added that contestants claiming he was Conor's lap dog were "only jealous because they can't trust anybody else in the house".

Discussing his recent rule break which led to a punishment for his housemates, Arron said he did not feel remorse, declaring: "I'm a team player when I like my team; I didn't like them."

Doctor Who star Colin Baker has claimed that he is unlikely to star in a 50th-anniversary special.

Fans of the sci-fi drama have speculated that a 2013 episode could bring back former Doctors, but Baker told Cambridge News that such a reunion is "not going to happen".

"They don't need us," said the actor, who originally played the sixth Doctor between 1984 and 1986. "The programme is doing extremely well without us.

"Also, every time someone asks me that question I hold up a photograph of myself when I played the part, compared to what I look like now, and say, 'OK, how do you deal with that?' I've changed."

Baker insisted that he is "neither for nor against" reprising his Doctor Who role, as long as his incarnation of the Time Lord got "a fair crack of the whip".

"There would be two big questions I would ask: the first is, is my Doctor going to get a fair crack of the whip in the story, and not be eclipsed by anybody else?" he explained.

"And the other one is, what vast fortune are you offering me? I'd be quite brutal... and say, if they offered me a million quid, I'd go on and say one line for them. If they offered me a tenner, I wouldn't."

Paul McGann - who played the eighth Doctor in a 1996 TV movie - previously told Digital Spy that he would "love" to reappear on the show, while Peter Davison (the fifth Doctor) has admitted that he would be "very surprised" to be asked back.

In 2011, Christopher Eccleston - who starred as the ninth Doctor in 2005 - also appeared to rule out a return.

Brian Dowling has criticised Arron Lowe and Conor McIntyre for letting their egos get in the way of their Big Brother experience.

The host said that this week's nominations, which feature Arron, Conor, Deana Uppal and Becky Hannon facing eviction, had brought out bad sides in the two male housemates.

"For Arron and Conor to act they way they do is ridiculous," said Dowling. "Arron says, 'my friends have stabbed me in the back', when he also nominated. 'They mention people's names', but so did he. But they're wrong because he's up. That's just ego.

"We've seen a different side to him and Conor. Beforehand Arron was a prankster, and now we're seeing something else.

"Conor is taking it all very seriously now. I just wish he'd go back to the night he walked in and he looked a lot of fun. That's got carried away in all the drama."

NBC has denied that David Gregory will be fired as host of Meet the Press.

The Peacock Network responded to a gossip item published by website The Daily, which claimed that Gregory was to be sacked due to falling ratings.

Meet The Press has long been the Sunday morning ratings winner, but recently it has struggled to top CBS's news hour Face The Nation.

An unnamed source claimed that NBC has also been unhappy with Gregory's performance since he took over for the late Tim Russert in 2008.

"The rumours recklessly reported by The Daily are categorically untrue," an NBC spokesperson told the New York Daily News.

NBC's representative also insisted that CBS's Face The Nation has been successful largely due to "gimmickry".

There has been a large shake-up within NBC's news division in recent weeks. Ann Curry was sacked as co-anchor of the channel's flagship morning show Today last week, apparently at the behest of her on-air partner Matt Lauer.

Today though, Cumberbatch's ascendancy stateside is well and truly cemented, as news arrives that he's to make a guest appearance in The Simpsons, an honour shared by the UK's Ricky Gervais, Tony Blair, Tom Jones, Eric Idle, Jeremy Irons and more...

It's not thought that Cumberbatch will be playing Sherlock in the episode (something of a waste, that), but an unconfirmed character. The actor came to the role fortuitously by being in the right place at the right time, the way he tells it:

"I was at a meeting in the same place The Simpsons is recorded and heard there was a part going in an episode. I said 'I hate to muscle in here guys but could I record it?' Next thing, I'm standing in a room with all those famous voices; Bart, Marge, Homer, Lisa."

First of all, doesn't 'A Celebration of Death' sound a bit like an episode title?

Secondly, does any other TV series display death so consistently? Casualty has had more episodes than Doctor Who, but I'll bet it can't match its body count (nearly two people per episode, assuming you only count onscreen deaths). The main character has died ten times, seven of them on screen, and hundreds of his friends have been killed by lasers, explosions, laserous explosions, knives, and pushing someone in a big wheelchair off a ledge with a forklift truck. While we are resigned to the companions being unlikely to die (permanently, at least. Rory has five episodes left to match the Doctor for most on screen deaths-that-aren't-really-deaths), the characters who we've just been introduced to are all potential red-shirts. It's such an integral part of the show that the Doctor Who Magazine's Time Team feature has a count of on-screen deaths (which, at the time of writing, had reached The Girl in the Fireplace and clocked up 1,479).

This is obviously the case with many ongoing series. In fiction, death is a dramatic device; the threat of it drives many a narrative. In Doctor Who much of the jeopardy involves the threat of death, whether that be to a small enclave of characters or to the entire universe, and much of the blame lies with the main character and his friends. Doctor Who's total death toll must surely be the highest of any television science-fiction series, which is all the more impressive when you consider the show's family audience. From the death of Old Mother in The Forest of Fear to the presumed demise of Madame Kovarian in The Wedding of River Song, thousands have died on screen, and trillions off it. Logopolis alone sees the wholesale destruction of a sizeable chunk of the universe via the TARDIS monitor. The frequent demonstration of mortality underpins the whole show, and gives it a depth that underlies the surface sheen of fun.

It pervades even the most gleeful romp. Doctor Who is, generally, not considered an especially dark show (certainly among that subgenre of commentators who express disappointment in every show that isn't The Wire), and on the surface it might not give that impression. However, no matter how much clamour there is for a more adult tone, even the most ostentatiously silly looking episodes of Doctor Who usually feature innocent people dying in horrible ways. Love & Monsters, one of the more divisive stories, may have a chase sequence straight out of Scooby Doo, but it also features the deaths of plenty of nice people who didn't really deserve to spend several weeks compressed into Peter Kay's buttocks before dissolving into a puddle. One of them is saved from this fate, but whether or not this is a good thing is somewhat ambiguous. Critics of this episode would point to its silliness, and the cartoon nature of the sequences where people are chased by monsters. I feel that Love & Monsters shows exactly why Doctor Who has such a broad appeal: it's an ostensibly silly episode packed with death, thwarted dreams, and enduring loneliness.

This is a reason for the breadth of the show's audience. Immediate enjoyment can come from the humour of the dialogue, character and ideas, the sheer giddy fun of it all. Quite a few Doctors have a similar front. Both the character and the show hide their keen intelligence and make people underestimate them ('My dear, nobody could be as stupid as he seems', for example). However, because the show is also completely willing to have its supporting cast die so regularly it undermines much of the lead character's heroism. When, in The Doctor Dances, the Ninth Doctor jubilantly cries "Everybody lives! Just this once!" it really is a rarity.

In The Pirate Planet the Doctor is asked what he does for a living and replies "I save planets mostly." As we find out in the same story, he is too late to save many planets and their populations from being destroyed, and he also has a habit of effortlessly making things worse in the short term, leading to yet more death. He is a reactionary rather than an instigator for most of his life, and when he changes his mind as decides to actively seek out and confront monsters, the death toll continues at the same steady pace.

Generally the Doctor occupies the 'letting die rather than killing' moral grey area (unless Bob Holmes was in a particularly bloodthirsty mood that day). There's a lot of wriggle room here, and some brilliant stories have come from both the deaths caused by the Doctor leaving him standing resolutely atop the moral highground, about to slip on a banana with the word 'genocide' written on it in permanent marker.

This underlying, almost unspoken aspect is present in most eras of the show. The earlier series had moments of silliness, education, and brutality. From the non-historical stories, it was clear that there were going to be casualties along the way. The historical stories had a different dramatic technique: show a historical situation involving needless deaths and have a slow-building tension that builds towards the inevitable destruction. As the format was expanded upon, we started seeing stories such as The Romans and The Myth Makers where events such as the Great Fire of Rome and the Wooden Horse of Troy are played as pitch-black comedies until the final act. Throughout the Troughton era, bases were besieged and their inhabitants were usually depleted in the process. Pertwee charmed and stropped his way through a series of civil servants and bullet-immune aliens. Tom Baker managed to be scarier than the monsters.

In the eighties, the aspect of collateral damage was pushed to the foreground in some stories, often ones with a very morbid sense of humour. While this period of Doctor Who isn't one of its more popular, at times it did force the viewer to think about the way the show is steeped in violence and fatalities (even if they're relatively bloodless).

In The Trial of a Time Lord, a story that is painfully close to being brilliant at times, the Doctor presents an example of his 'winning' by saving the passengers on a ship from a race of aggressive plant-life. It is then pointed out to him that his actions in saving these lives involved committing genocide.

When the series returned in 2005, it kept the impression of a fun adventure for the most part, but included the aspect of the character confronting the death and destruction he helped cause. All the while, in the background, people kept on dying. A fallible hero is more interesting than a perfect one, and with the Doctor we get someone who wins nearly every time, but rarely without sacrifice.

Nolan North and Claudia Black, stars of the critically-acclaimed Uncharted video game franchise, will join their Uncharted co-star Emily Rose on Syfy's popular series Haven as guest stars during the show's third season, which begins Friday, September 21 at 10PM (ET/PT). Together, the trio provide the voices of the action-adventure video games' lead character, treasure hunter Nathan Drake (North) and his globe-trotting companions Elena Fischer (Rose) and Chloe Frazer (Black).

On Haven, Nolan North will play the role of Anderson in Haven's eleventh episode this season. Though charismatic, witty, confident and independent, Anderson awakes one day with memory loss, only to discover that everyone in Haven has fallen into a mysterious sleep.

In the series' two part episode "Magic Hour," Claudia Black will play the role of Moira, a beauty whose bitterness may make her capable of murder.

Season three of Haven picks up immediately following the events of the gripping season two finale with Audrey having been brutally kidnapped; Nathan (Lucas Bryant) warned against pursuing a romantic relationship with Audrey; and Duke (Eric Balfour) seemingly engaged in a fight to the death with Nathan after he discovers his family lineage is to kill Haven citizens with troubles.

Haven, based on the novella The Colorado Kid from renowned author Stephen King, follows former FBI agent Audrey Parker, who becomes a cop in the small town of Haven, Maine, and soon discovers the town's many secrets, which also hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of her lost past.

From leading independent studio Entertainment One (eOne), Haven is co-commissioned by Shaw Media in Canada and globally via Universal Networks International (UNI).

The creative team behind Haven includes executive producers John Morayniss (The Firm, Hell on Wheels) from eOne Television and David MacLeod (Legends of the Fall, The Ray Bradbury Theater) of Big Motion Pictures, who are joined by Lloyd Segan, Shawn Piller, Scott Shepherd (Stephen King's The Dead Zone, Greek) of Piller/Segan/Shepherd and Matt McGuinness (Journeyman, Dark Blue) as well as Sam Ernst & Jim Dunn (Stephen King's The Dead Zone), who also developed the series.

Haven is produced by Entertainment One and Big Motion Pictures in association with Piller/Segan/Shepherd and airs on Syfy in the U.S., Showcase in Canada and internationally on Universal Networks International's channels. Entertainment One controls the worldwide distribution rights to the one-hour series and concluded a deal with Germany's Tele München Group (TMG) for the television rights in Continental Europe.

Nickelodeon will debut the all-new, CG-animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with a one-hour special event on Saturday, Sept. 29, at 11:00 a.m. (ET/PT). The 26-episode, half-hour action-comedy series breathes new life into the wildly popular band of reptile brothers played by Jason Biggs (American Pie) as "Leonardo," Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings) as "Raphael," Greg Cipes (Teen Titans) as "Michelangelo" and Rob Paulsen (Planet Sheen) as "Donatello" (Paulsen also voiced the original "Raphael" from 1987-1996 in the very first TMNT series).

Rounding out the cast in the series' key roles are: Mae Whitman (Parenthood) as "April O'Neil," a gutsy and independent sixteen-year-old who befriends the Turtles after they save her from an alien attack; Hoon Lee (Royal Pains) as "Master Splinter," the Turtles' sensei and father figure and Kevin Michael Richardson (Penguins of Madagascar) as "Shredder," the commander of an evil ninja army called the Foot Clan and one of the deadliest martial artists in the world.

Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles begins as the turtles emerge from their hidden lair in the sewers for the very first time, ready to confront the wondrous and hostile world of New York City and face enemies more dangerous and pizza more delicious than anything they could have imagined. Funnier and with more Ninjutsu than ever before, the show will explore the companionship of four teenage brothers learning to rely on themselves and one another as they unravel the mystery of their existence and grow to become the heroes in a half-shell that they are destined to be. The premiere episode was executive produced by Ciro Nieli, Joshua Sternin & Jeff Ventimilia and Peter Hastings.

Considered one of the most popular kids' television programs of the 1980s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a classic, global property created in 1984 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. It first debuted as a successful comic book series and then became a hit animated TV show, a live-action television series and later spawned four blockbuster theatrical releases. The property also has translated into a significant consumer products business - with DVDs, video games, toys and more--that has generated billions of dollars at retail.

Martine McCutcheon has revealed why she has turned down the opportunity to star on Strictly Come Dancing.

The former EastEnders actress, who was strongly linked to the ballroom dancing show in 2010, said that her dance training at school would add expectation from the nation.

Speaking to Digital Spy, she reasoned: "I'm meant to be good at it. It would be like Rio Ferdinand going on a football show and getting a panel with two on it.

"In front of the country. I'm meant to be singing, dancing and acting. I think it would do me harm if I went on and people said, 'Oh, she's s**t'. So it would be a no."

Of the possibility of an appearance in the show's annual festive edition, the 36-year-old added: "I'd do it once for fun, but I wouldn't want to be judged week in and week out."

On whether she would instead compete on rival ITV reality show Dancing on Ice, she simply said: "I can't dance on ice, because I'm like bambi on ice."

However, McCutcheon added teasingly: "I never rule anything out. I'm an entertainer. Be it presenting, singing, acting, I just do things I love. I'm lucky to be at that stage in my life. I will definitely make a return though. I've missed it and it's so good."

The star was promoting her new TV show Let's Get Gold on which she is a judge. The Olympics-themed talent show premiered last night (July 5) and continues tonight (July 6) at 9pm on ITV1.

The BBC has denied reports that Sir Cliff Richard has been approached to coach The Voice UK.

The 'Living Doll' singer was alleged to have told The People that there had been "a conversation" with producers about him joining will.i.am, Jessie J, Sir Tom Jones and Danny O'Donoghue on the show's second series.

"I'd be silly if I didn't think about it," he was quoted as saying. "The Voice is a terrific show and the format really interests me, particularly the blind audition. It's definitely ­something I would like to do."

However, BBC Head of Communications Sam Hodges has now dismissed the 71-year-old's claim on Twitter, stating: "Despite reports to the contrary, there are no plans for Cliff Richard to join ‪#TheVoiceUK‬."

BBC One controller Danny Cohen said back in May that he wants all four coaches to return to The Voice, though there has been speculation that Jessie J wants to quit her role.

Despite losing almost seven million viewers over the course of its first series and the cancellation of its national tour due to lack of demand, The Voice UK has been heralded as the BBC's biggest entertainment launch in a decade, with more viewers on average than the debut series of The X Factor UK, Strictly Come Dancing and I'm a Celebrity.